On May 12-13, 2023, the Transnational China Research Hub at the University of California, Santa Cruz, hosted around 20 scholars in person, 7 scholars via Zoom, and over 370 registrants via webinar, to discuss the state and future of China Studies in the United States and beyond. It was an attempt by a cross-disciplinary group of faculty and graduate students to reimagine our research and teaching about China at a moment of social upheaval, geopolitical tensions, and political challenges between China and liberal democracies today.
Convened by Shelly Chan (Humanities), Ben Read (Social Sciences), and Yiman Wang (Arts), the workshop saw spirited debate over an opening roundtable, four panel sessions, and one round of “lightning talks.” Discussions ranged across a diverse set of topics, culminating in a (virtual) keynote on Saturday afternoon with cultural theorist Rey Chow (Duke University). The conversations, which deliberately placed scholars across disciplinary divides in conversation, were productive, provocative and at times unsettling. Nevertheless, they collectively provided a map of an emerging field of “transnational China studies.” Speakers were encouraged to bring their own work into dialogue with contemporary discourses of a “rising China” or the “New Cold War” between the United states and China. The detailed conference program and schedule can be found here, and a brief summary of each session is listed below.
Session 1: China Studies Now (roundtable) represented, in the words of chair Gail Hershatter of UC Santa Cruz, a moment of reflection on the “transnational as a site of creative rethinking for the China field.” The four speakers spoke widely on broad themes ranging from Chinese state surveillance and censorship (Berry), expanding temporal/geographical boundaries of China studies (Wasserstrom), a Global South/BRI perspective from Latin America (Hu-DeHart), and a deep engagement with positionality (Chu). Jeffrey Wasserstrom (“Are We All Transnational Now?”), noted that the transnational was not necessarily new, when writing about China and other states/empires. And yet, reflecting on his training at Berkeley since the 1980s, he did not recall reading much about Southeast or South Asia. He expressed interest in more “comparative” studies to broaden Chinese history geographically and thematically — or ways to present “China and…” He illustrated this through his ongoing work with Hong Kong activists, their inter-referencing with Thai youth activist groups, and new emerging inter-Asian solidarities. Michael Berry (“Age of Silence”), described the current moment in Chinese literary and film studies as an “Age of Silence,” referring specifically to difficulties imposed on literary and film production. Having published three books in the past year — including the translation of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary, he emphasized the need to write more about China, because stories about China are being lost, while continuing the dialogues between US and Chinese scholars to avoid misinformation and loss of communication. Nellie Chu of Duke-Kunshan University used her personal experience living in COVID-zero China as a Hong Kong/American dual citizen, as well as teaching at a US-China joint institution in China, as a lens into how geopolitics influences lives of academics and individuals at the interstices. Finally, Evelyn Hu-Dehart concluded the roundtable on a more upbeat note, drawing attention to a proliferation of “China studies” in Latin America, commensurate with Chinese state interest and investment in recent years. She introduced some examples (such as Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa at Colegio de México, UNAM centro de estudios de China-Mexican, Costa Rican University Center for China Studies, Universidad de Bogotá Andres Bello, Universidad de Chile, and new Confucius Institutes all over the region), to demonstrate how shifting our vantage point presents a different narrative of expanding China studies beyond the United States.
Session 2: Cold War Borders and Diasporas featured four papers which focused on spaces previously marginal to the study of China — two papers (Van Dongen and Tan) explored diasporic Chinese student mobilities during the Cold War, while two papers focused on the Hong Kong-Guangdong border from the perspective of marriage (Miu) and property disputes (Ho). Els van Dongen (“Transnationalism in Times of Nationalism”) used the concept of inter-temporality to study Chinese student returnees into the early PRC. Focusing on student returnees’ liminality as well as bifurcation of the homeland, Van Dongen demonstrated how students’ experiences could uncover hidden infrastructures of migration in the Cold War. Joshua Tan (“Creating Stranded Students in the Early Cold War”), looked instead at American missionary efforts to re-orient Chinese students in the United States into an emerging Cold War geography of “Free Asia,” to support their ongoing efforts to establish new institutions beyond China; in doing so, they created new networks and connections. The Cold War, however, did create new barriers across Hong Kong and Guangdong, the latter subject to socialist campaigns and land reform. Wilson Miu (“Ideological Threat and Regulatory Concern”) drew attention to how the 1949 revolution both separated a previously unified marriage market, and also propelled marriages between Guangdong women and Hong Kong men — personal connections which challenge the idea of a “bamboo curtain” between China and Hong Kong. Denise Ho (“Borderlands”), took the case of a disputed property situated at the China-Hong Kong border, to explore questions of socialist land reform in relation to local circumstances; in this case, revealing the importance of custom and local accommodation to socialist land reform. Shelly Chan (UCSC) prompted the panelists collectively to think about Cold War China as a framework, in relation to recent historiography on global Maoism and PRC history.
Session 3: Indigeneity and Ethnicity brought together an eclectic group of four scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to discuss Indigenous and non-Han people in China/Taiwan and their representations in media and policy. Film scholar Jason McGrath (“The Soil Never Rejects a Seed”) examined the portrayals of Indigenous peoples in Taiwanese literature and film, namely in the 2021 television series “Seqalu” and Yao-chang Chen’s novel “Puppet Flower,” published in English translation in 2023. Even as they presented a subversive image of Taiwan against the PRC through the incorporation of “indigenous” elements, images of indigeneity were fetishized for Taiwanese viewers who had very few connections with the people and cultures represented. Historian James Millward (“The Issue of Indigeneity in Xinjiang (and the PRC)”) discussed the complexities of using the term “Indigenous” when referring to the various ethnic minorities (minzu) within the PRC. Millward noted the slippages in scholars’ use of Chinese state categories, and the need to acknowledge the historic diversity of minzu groups, the limitations of the state-category system, and the political stakes of minority relations in China. Archaeologist Stephen Acabado (“Landscape, Habitus and Identity”), presented a comparative study of indigeneity in the Philippines and Taiwan, focusing primarily on UNESCO sites in the Philippines where he conducted archaeological digs. He demonstrated a significant similarity across agricultural practices in the two places. Finally, literary scholar Sabina Knight (“Slaughtered Dreams”) talked about the importance of translating and studying non-Han literature. Knight used her previous work and teaching on “Chinese literature” as a window into the stakes in naming (and possibly reifying) China, and the need to balance nuance and accessibility. She also shared a recent art display she created with Smith college students using Uyghur poems and photographs of prisoners at the Xinjiang detention camps, and spoke about ongoing linguistic erasures of non-Mandarin literary works and the need for scholars to help preserve them.
Session 4: Comparative and Sinophone Configurations featured another interdisciplinary group, ranging from the social sciences, anthropology, and film criticism, exploring intersections and referencing across Sinophone spaces. Anthropologist Sara Friedman (“Perspectival Politics”) introduced her long-term research on China-Taiwan marriages, including more recently on LGBT parenting and family formation across the Taiwan Strait. She noted the ways in which Chinese (PRC) spouses — especially foreign wives in Taiwan — stood-in for anxieties over Taiwanese sovereignty, as well as how the Taiwanese government’s more recent claims to advocating progressive LGBT rights buttress its political claims to sovereignty. Literary scholar Calvin Hui (“A Desire for Hong Kong”), introduced his ongoing research on Jia Zhangke’s film Mountains May Depart. Hui focused on Jia’s use of the figure of the diasporic Chinese (Hong Kong) woman — not as a foreign outlet of anxiety, but instead, mediating the self-actualization and rediscovery of the protagonist’s diasporic Chinese identity in the yet-to-come twenty-first century. The presentations by Ben Read (“What are we Learning from China-Taiwan Comparisons?”) and Hsin-Chieh Chang (“Postmodern Ideology under Fertility Change”) both focused more explicitly on the contexts of comparison in social scientific research: between mainland China and Taiwan (Read), and among East Asian millennials (Chang). Read provided a review of scholarship which compared Sinophone worlds, transnational China, and concluded by speculating that the idea of China/Taiwan as an “ideal” pairing for comparisons may seem to be outdated yet remains productive. Chang, drawing on World Values Survey data from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea to examine ideological shifts amidst compressed modernity, globalization, and generational change in the twenty-first century.
Session 5: Crossings (Lightning Talks) saw a series of brief, critical reflections on a few keywords and themes in China studies today. Theater studies scholar Daphne Lei (“Sinophone Performance and Performativity”) talked about the inherent transnationality of Chinese theater studies, and the idea of China studies as an “occupy movement” within various disciplines — not as a hegemonic power but extending boundaries beyond China itself. Lei concluded with a “triple negation” in the Sinophone — not (identical to) Chinese, non-Chinese, but not “not Chinese” — and encouraged the audience to think through categories such as “Sinophone.” Anthropologist Lok Siu (“China, Refracted”) emphasized how knowledge of China is mediated, and cannot be understood through a singular lens or reduced to a homogenous entity. Taking the case of the Chinese diaspora in Latin America, Siu reflected on how diasporic Chinese communities in Latin America and their governments perceive China’s political, economic and cultural power in the region, especially in light of post-pandemic rise in anti-China and anti-Asian sentiments. Qianxiong Yang (“Chinese Flatliners”) spoke about tang ping (literally: lying flat), a trending term emerging on Chinese social media, which was translated into English in 2021, amidst the exhaustion of the pandemic-induced lockdowns. Yang highlighted the paradoxes of “underperformance” against neoliberal “common prosperity” in China — neither laziness or personal inadequacy, nor an organized movement of resistance or transgressive counter-cultural movement. Yang instead argued how tang ping challenged the view of action and agency contained in neoliberal governmentality. Finally, Hentyle Yapp (“The Ubiquity of Asia”) shared insights from his ongoing work on a history of disability law and aesthetics in China and the US, which contemporaneously took center-stage in 1990 — across two countries that appear antagonistic to civil rights. Yapp further introduced the concept of “ubiquity” to talk about China and Asia in late capitalism beyond existing frames of orientalism and white supremacy. He urged a re-theorization of race and capital under the current transition in capital accumulation from American empire to Global Asia, while reflecting more on how disability constellates across the Pacific and the world in ways that reveal the operations of power and capital modernity.
Session 6: Oceans, Coasts and Islands collectively interrogated and discussed the ocean as medium, metaphor, connector, divider, narrative tool, and means of transport — challenging us to rethink the overwhelming focus on land-based histories. Melissa Macauley (“Translocalism on China’s Maritime Frontier”) centered on the concept of maritime Chaozhou, taking the translocal nature of familial ties on the Southeast coast of Guangdong province, to challenge the rigid separation of coastal China, the South China Sea, and Southeast Asia. Winnie Wong (“Imagined Returns”) emphasized the symbolic and metaphoric power of the ocean and its significance for the worlds of art, especially from the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong. Tracking the claims of contemporary street painters from Hong Kong to famous Chinese painters rumored to have studied in the West, Wong drew attention to gaps in knowledge, between myth and record, which are represented by the ocean, which lies at the core of the identity of many Hong Kong painters active today. Shelly Chan (“The Nanyang was not Southeast Asia”), continued the thread of thinking about the symbolic and material uses of the ocean — through the disappearance of the imagined geography of Nanyang (South Seas), which was replaced by “Southeast Asia” in the postcolonial period to downplay China’s claims to the region. Chan proposed that a “Nanyang-based continuum” challenges rigid separations between Land/Sea, North/South China, East/Southeast Asia, providing a new toolkit not to restore China-centrism, but centering the Nanyang and locating China within this maritime world. Finally, Erin Huang (“Islanding”) drew attention to the South China Sea, not as the interconnected migratory world of the Nanyang but as a more recent political construction by defense and security analysis, and as the theater of contemporary military conflict. Huang used the concept of islanding to highlight the process of creating islands as a technology of the ocean, and concluded with a methodological question for the field — how to move archipelagic studies outside its conventionally assigned areas to find new histories of entanglement. Chair Chris Connery (UCSC) rounded up the discussion by noting the constant dissatisfaction with categories, and reflecting on the question of whether all approaches to spatial categories contain their own deconstruction.
Keynote Session
The intense series of discussions culminated in a keynote session chaired by Yiman Wang, Writing Diaspora Thirty Years Later: A Virtual Conversation with Rey Chow, which saw heated debate and discussion over the role of China studies in the United States today. Chow began by discussing the motivation behind her first two books, Woman and Chinese Modernity (1991) and Writing Diaspora (1993). She drew attention to the limited scope of China studies at that time, which was so confined to regional studies that scholars didn’t deal with critical theories, postcolonial studies, or cultural studies in the Chinese context. According to Chow, China studies were very much metaphorized by the enlightenment motif, portraying China as falling on the side of darkness. Quoting an undergraduate student at the UNC, Chow noted how “when China enters the picture, the West judges it according to terms that have already been doctored.” This led to Chow to comment on the issue of race and racism, and the need to look beyond the history of North American history and transatlantic colonialism, to the various “belief systems” that lead to segregation and differentiation among people, chief of which is the globalization of American values since World War II and the “racial” divide between the US and its allies, and China. She further critiqued a concerted effort by America and its allies to keep China in the “darkness” to circumvent the rise of China, “the first non-White power to challenge the West on every level.” She also emphasized the significant role that the international news media has been playing in shaping these perceptions — both past and present. Finally, Chow challenged tropes of a polarization between democracy and authoritarianism; she argued that this dichotomy was a Cold War product which remains an implicit and unwritten framework that needs to be deconstructed.
Three discussants engaged with Chow’s broader scholarship and responded to her remarks and the themes of the workshop. Boreth Ly (UCSC) inquired how Chow’s writing style had evolved over the decades, and where she gained her courage in writing and scholarship. Calvin Hui (William and Mary) introduced the development of postcolonial studies and Sinophone studies, and Chow’s implicit dialogue with the latter through her particular interest in languaging as a postcolonial practice. In light of the thirty-year divide between the 1989 student movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen square and protests in contemporary Hong Kong, Evelyn Char (UCSC) asked whether alternative approaches to understanding Hong Kongers’ nostalgia for British colonialism are possible, beyond simply critiquing them as a colonized people.
Chow’s responses covered a range of issues — she attributed her straightforward style simply to the fact that English was not her native language. Writing in a non-native language made her more alert to and conscious of the language itself; she felt she was only saying things as they were and pointing out the obvious. On transnationality and the Sinophone, Chow said in a broad sense, that all post-colonial, non-Western cultures had always been transnational, but she also thought the transnational was only an “adjective.” As for the Sinophone, she said it would have to include mainland China, since “all of us should have a claim to China and Chineseness.” In response to contemporary Hong Kong, Chow found what she called nostalgia for British colonialism unsettling, and criticized the ouble standards in the U.S. media when representing China.
During the Q&A session, the audience engaged in a lively debate. The issues include: how and whether to claim “Chineseness,” how to critique the PRC without falling back into racist and Cold War tropes, how to navigate intellectual contradictions without taking a rigid position, how to understand the US-China conflict not as one over authoritarianism but economic competition, and how to develop an anti-war politics globally. In response, Professor Chow emphasized her constant skepticism toward both PRC/Chinese nationalism and American hostility toward China. For instance, she felt unable to evaluate claims about the Xinjiang camps because she has not been there. Chow also urged scholars to take a critical stance against American-led attempts to isolate and contain China in contemporary geopolitics.
Plenary Discussion
The workshop concluded with a final discussion led by co-conveners Shelly Chan, Ben Read and Yiman Wang, reflecting on some of the broad themes discussed over the past two-days. Yiman Wang (UCSC) invoked the image of a constellation of stars, to visualize the interconnected, and yet distinct bodies of work which were discussed, in attempting to connect the dots between various topics. Ben Read (UCSC), noted how the workshop had served as a reminder to de-parochilize perspectives of China steeped in a US-China tradition, and question how “China” looks from various other vantage points — in other words, what has our “field” missed? Referencing debates over fraught concepts like democracy and authoritarianism, and binaries (US-China), Read further cautioned against simply getting stuck with the challenges of defining terms of critique, bur rather employing the best and most nuanced vocabulary from scholarly analysis. Gail Hershatter (UCSC) noted the persistence of “pre-contaminated terms” — and urged a rethinking about critical uses of “transnationality” and the frameworks it was trying to disrupt in the first place.
A number of comments dealt with issues of space, configurations, and how to choose an appropriate context within which to situate “China.” Melissa Macauley noted that the choice to think transnationally entailed thinking about reimagining space, and finding the correct scale of analysis to make visible different connections. Covell Meyskens (Naval Postgraduate School), echoed that the whole conference was organized around space and had introduced different spatial concepts beyond the familiar.. Els van Dongen (NTU) also commented on the need to create inclusive geographies, and cautioned against over-emphasizing connectivity while possibly ignoring “non-mobile” spaces or peoples. Chris Connery (UCSC) noted that new configurations and geographical categories emerge to cure the mistakes of the past, and one might start by identifying an object of concern, and then seeing the spaces it makes.
Others dealt with the omissions, things that might have received greater coverage in a different configuration of panels — Evelyn Hu-DeHart suggested more attention to perspectives of European empires from maritime Asia as one means of expanding the horizons of “China studies” and de-parochializing the focus of Anglo-American/China studies. Hentyle Yapp (UCSD) stated that race and raciality was not sufficiently covered in the workshop, although racial formation theory, or theories of race premised on racial capital were also key to theorizing the transnational. Jason McGrath (Minnesota) likewise noted a lack of coverage on environmental issues, although the ongoing ecological crisis has shaped his own teaching and research.
Finally, returning to the theme of Chow’s keynote, and the ethics and contexts of critique, Sean Metzger (UCLA), citing Hayden White’s Content of the Form, commented on what the current form of critique takes today, and indeed, what is the appropriate form of knowledge and critique in the current moment? Sara Friedman (Indiana), reflected on a major theme introduced in the opening roundtable — how we know what we know, as what we know shapes how we imagine, and how we imagine shapes what we know. She asked: what are the possibilities if we don’t have access or ability to interact? Imagination shapes possibilities, and expanding our imagination is essential to critical scholarship.
Welcome remarks by Shelly Chan (UCSC)
Evelyn Hu-Dehart (Brown) and Gail Hershatter (UCSC) in conversation (Session 1)
Hsin-Chieh Chang (Fudan) presenting via zoom (Session 4)
Intense discussion following the round of “Lighting Talks” (Session 5)
Keynote session: Writing Diaspora Thirty Years Later: A virtual conversation with Rey Chow
Group photo (Day 1)
Group photo (Day 2)
This report was written by Joshua Tan, PhD candidate in History at UC Santa Cruz, with note-taking assistance from the following UCSC graduate students: Jonathan van Harmelen (History), Ania Gricuk (History), Lanzeng Sun (Politics), Ailin Zhou (Film and Digital Media).